A Nobel prizewinner is reporting that
DNA can be generated from its teleported "quantum imprint"

A STORM of skepticism has greeted experimental results emerging from
the lab of a Nobel laureate which, if confirmed, would shake the
foundations of several fields of science.

"If the results are correct," says
theoretical chemist
Jeff Reimers of the University
of Sydney, Australia, "these would be the most significant
experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding
re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern
chemistry."

Luc Montagnier, who shared the
Nobel prize for medicine in 2008 for his part in establishing that
HIV causes AIDS, says he has evidence that
DNA can send spooky electromagnetic imprints of itself into distant
cells and fluids.

If that wasn't heretical enough, he also
suggests that enzymes can mistake the ghostly imprints for real DNA,
and faithfully copy them to produce the real thing. In effect this
would amount to a kind of quantum teleportation ("Teleportation,
But not as We Know it") of the DNA.

Many researchers contacted for comment by New Scientist reacted with
disbelief. Gary Schuster, who studies DNA conductance effects
at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, compared it to
"pathological science".

Jacqueline Barton, who does
similar work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
was equally skeptical.

"There aren't a lot of data given,
and I don't buy the explanation," she says.

One blogger has suggested Montagnier
should be awarded an
IgNobel prize.

Yet the results can't be dismissed out of hand.

"The experimental methods used
appear comprehensive," says Reimers.

So what have Montagnier and his team
actually found?

Full details of the experiments are not yet available, but the basic
set-up is as follows. Two adjacent but physically separate test
tubes were placed within a copper coil and subjected to a very weak
extremely low frequency electromagnetic field of 7 hertz. The
apparatus was isolated from Earth's natural magnetic field to stop
it interfering with the experiment.

One tube contained a fragment of DNA
around 100 bases long; the second tube contained pure water.

After 16 to 18 hours, both samples were independently subjected to
the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method routinely used
to amplify traces of DNA by using enzymes to make many copies of the
original material.

The gene fragment was apparently
recovered from both tubes, even though one should have contained
just water (see below diagram).

DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA - whose
concentration has not been revealed - had been subjected to several
dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field.

In each cycle it was diluted 10-fold,
and "ghost" DNA was only recovered after between seven and 12
dilutions of the original. It was not found at the ultra-high
dilutions used in homeopathy.

Physicists in Montagnier's team suggest that DNA emits low-frequency
electromagnetic waves which imprint the structure of the molecule onto the water.

This structure, they claim, is preserved
and amplified through quantum coherence effects, and because it
mimics the shape of the original DNA, the enzymes in the PCR process
mistake it for DNA itself, and somehow use it as a template to make
DNA matching that which "sent" the signal (DNA
Waves and Water).

"The biological experiments do seem
intriguing, and I wouldn't dismiss them," says Greg Scholes of
the University of Toronto in Canada, who last year demonstrated
that
quantum effects occur in plants.

Yet according to Klaus Gerwert,
who studies interactions between water and biomolecules at the Ruhr
University in Bochum, Germany,

"It is hard to understand how the
information can be stored within water over a timescale longer
than picoseconds."

"The structure would be destroyed
instantly," agrees
Felix Franks, a retired academic chemist in
London who has studied water for many years.

Franks was involved as a peer reviewer
in the debunking of a controversial study in 1988 which claimed that
water had a memory (see far below "How 'ghost molecules' were
exorcised").

"Water has no 'memory'," he says
now. "You can't make an imprint in it and recover it later."

Despite the skepticism over Montagnier's
explanation, the consensus was that the results deserve to be
investigated further.

Montagnier's colleague, theoretical physicist
Giuseppe Vitiello of the University of Salerno in Italy, is
confident that the result is reliable.

"I would exclude that it's
contamination," he says. "It's very important that other groups
repeat it."

Montagnier strained a solution of the
bacterium Mycoplasma pirum through a filter with pores small enough
to prevent the bacteria penetrating. The filtered water emitted the
same frequency of electromagnetic signal as the bacteria themselves.

He says he has evidence that many
species of bacteria and many viruses give out the electromagnetic
signals, as do some diseased human cells.

Montagnier says that the full details of his latest experiments will
not be disclosed until the paper is accepted for publication.

"Surely you are aware that
investigators do not reveal the detailed content of their
experimental work before its first appearance in peer-reviewed
journals," he says.

The latest findings by Luc Montagnier evoke long-discredited work by
the French researcher Jacques Benveniste.

In a paper in Nature (vol
333, p 816) in 1988 he claimed to show that
water had a "memory",
and that the activity of human antibodies was retained in solutions
so dilute that they couldn't possibly contain any antibody molecules
(New Scientist, 14 July 1988, p 39).

Faced with widespread skepticism over the paper, including from the
chemist Felix Franks who had advised against publication, Nature
recruited magician James Randi and chemist and "fraudbuster"
Walter
Stewart of the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda,
Maryland, to investigate Benveniste's methods.

They found his result to be "a
delusion", based on a flawed design.

In 1991, Benveniste repeated his
experiment under double-blind conditions, but not to the
satisfaction of referees at Nature and Science. Two years later came
the final indignity when he was suspended for damaging the image of
his institute. He died in October 2004.

That's not to say that quantum effects must be absent from
biological systems. Quantum effects have been proposed in both
plants and birds.

Montagnier and his colleagues are hoping
that their paper won't suffer the same fate as Benveniste's.